Raspberry PI with 8GB SD card.

I came home on friday night to find a jiffy bag waiting behind my door.  The content was my Raspberry PI.

So, this is the Model B card.  What exactly did I get for my £30 (ish)?  Actually, it was just the board. Nothing else at all.  In truth, it is a hell of a lot for the money.  Fully working computer, with 2 USB connections, 10/100 Mbps Network port, HDMI, Composite video and 2 channel audio output.  10 GP IO pins, 2 ribbon cable connectors (one has been seen in test with a camera attached) and on the other side of the board, there is a standard sized SD card slot.

So, to turn this into a fully functional computer, what did I need to bring to the party?

1. SD Card for the OS and software (8GB class 4, £12 from ASDA)

2. USB Keyboard (£3 from ASDA)

3. USB Mouse (£3 from ASDA)

4. Power (£10 from RS Components)

5. Cable to plug into the Telly – for me this is HDMI, but with the audio cable too.

6. a Telly to see what is happening.

7. Network cable. (had one knocking around the house already)

Firstly a word on the above prices. The Keyboard was on offer at the time, for £3 I couldn’t pass it up, for my intended application, I won’t need to have it attached for anything other than configuration, you’ll see later what I mean, same applies for the mouse.   For Power, I actually didn’t use the one from RS Components (that will be delivered with my Second PI.)  I actually used the cable from an £8 Phone charger, which I plugged into an iPhone charger. The £8 phone charger I have repurposed for something else that doesn’t need to supply 1A of power.

For my Pi #1 the plan is to get it working on my old Sharp Flat TV.  For this I needed to use a HDMI to DVI cable, and for audio a stereo cable. Both of these I already had knocking around from various pieces of kit that I’d bought in the past.

To get the PI up and running, with all the pieces that I described above. In total it cost about £68 plus a Telly.  This is a conservative estimate, but remember that the first £30 of that is the PI itself. So the rest could be scrounged up from left over parts, in the back of cupboards, or temporarily borrowed.